Poseidon's Wake (19 page)
‘More than we have time to cover at the moment. This objective of yours – can you tell me a little more about it? I understand you wanting to keep things as close to your chest as possible until we got here, but we’re on Europa now. Shouldn’t I know the full picture?’
Nissa gave a small sigh and called up a map of the Europan surface, peeled open like an orange. ‘We’re here,’ she said, jabbing with a finger. ‘All these dots, these are abandoned cities. Abandoned doesn’t mean empty, of course.’ Her finger skated to a knot of ruins, settling on one bloated dot. ‘This is Underthrace. It was one of the biggest subsurface settlements before the Fall – a bubble economy, skirting the brink of what was legal or ethical elsewhere in the system. You can see why it would have appealed to your grandmother.’
‘You have proof that Sunday was here?’
‘Concrete. I’ve seen the paper trails. When your family’s finances were on the slide, it looks like they tried to move a lot of their more questionable holdings into Underthrace’s independent credit system. My guess is Sunday was shrewd enough to want to safeguard her art as well.’
Kanu nodded slowly. ‘I’m sure you’re right. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if she banked some of her artworks here. If nothing else, she wouldn’t have wanted the market flooded with her work after her death.’
‘I’m glad you approve of my theory. It would be a little disappointing to be wrong.’
‘I don’t think you are. But I suspect there might be something else in Underthrace.’
Nissa twisted to face him again. ‘Something to do with Sunday?’
‘I doubt she would have had direct knowledge of it. It’s more likely to have been initiated by the next generation – my mother, her contemporaries. They’d have had the time and the knowledge.’
‘The time and the knowledge for what?’
‘Nissa, it’s time I spoke frankly. This isn’t what you think it is – there’s something much bigger going on. You’ve come to Europa on some pretext, but so have I – our meeting wasn’t coincidence after all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I always knew you’d be in Lisbon, and that there was a good chance we’d run into each other.’
‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘I was there. I saw your reaction. You were as surprised as I was.’
‘At the time I believed it was a genuine coincidence.’
They had descended twenty kilometres since breaking through the ice – deeper than any part of Earth’s seas – and mindless black fathoms lay beneath them still. From the hull there came not a murmur of complaint as it bore the smoothly rising stresses.
‘Only yesterday,’ Nissa said, ‘you told me you didn’t feel quite right. I reassured you it was to be expected and dismissed your concerns, but it’s obvious now that I was wrong, for which I apologise. I should have listened to you. But we’re on Europa because I chose to come here, looking for art. Not because of some grand conspiracy you dragged me into. Can you hold on to that simple truth for a few hours?’
Kanu closed his eyes, opened them again, hoping that the world would have done the decent thing and changed into a less problematic version of itself.
‘I want to.’
‘So do me a favour and try. There are some floating structures coming up soon which we’ll cut through to save time. We may stir up a few Regals as we pass and I don’t want to be distracted if that happens.’ Then added, under her breath: ‘The four days home are going to be interesting.’
There was no point in stealth.
Fall of Night
’s searchlights pushed out at all angles into the surrounding water, turning the little ship into a neon-spined pufferfish. Nissa did not care who knew of her arrival, only that she did not startle the unwary.
They nosed through looming dark structures still secured to the ocean floor, ovals or spheres for the most part, strung along the tethers like baubles. Each of the ruins was large enough to be considered a city in its own right, and indeed – according to the maps and records – many of them had been autonomous enclaves, bubbles within the bubble, exploring their own fringes of the edge economy.
Nissa was justifiably nervous. There were hot spots and pressure gradients, evidence of recent or ongoing inhabitation. Kanu felt the tension boiling off her.
‘They talk about the Regals as if they’re one thing,’ she said, keeping up a commentary as if it was the only thing holding them both on the right side of sanity. ‘In truth, there are about a hundred different factions down here, and most of them hate each other more than they hate us.’
‘Who is your contact? What are you hoping to exchange for the artworks?’
‘My contact is the Margrave. As for leverage – money’s useless down here. There are no economic ties to the rest of the system, no way of moving credit in or out.’ But then she noticed something. ‘Oh, what’s this?’
‘Show me.’
‘Movement. Warm objects.’ She tapped her finger against a smudge of thermal signatures emerging from a fissure in one of the tethered structures.
The thermal signatures were Regals, but moving too swiftly to be swimming under their own power. There were a dozen of them, organised into an arrowhead squadron.
Fall of Night
’s sensors picked out the powered drones they were using for propulsion, each Regal drawn along by one of the machines. They could swim, of course – all of the Regals had tails and flippers rather than legs – but machines would always be faster. They were armed and armoured, but it all looked makeshift, cobbled together from technological junk and detritus – the scavenged titbits of what had once been a thriving submarine economy.
‘The Margrave’s people?’
‘Probably. We’re in his sphere of jurisdiction, more or less.’
‘You don’t sound certain.’
‘I was told I wouldn’t be contacted until we reached Underthrace itself.’
‘Could we outrun them?’
‘Oh, easily. Wouldn’t gain us much, though. If you don’t do business with the Regals, you don’t do business with anyone.’
The Regals carried their own lights. They had glow-sticks and luminous paint, some of which flickered and changed in a way that reminded Kanu of Sunday’s psycho-reactive graffiti. Their submarine armour was horned and bladed. They also carried long, spearlike weapons with triggers and gas canisters.
Nissa allowed them to approach. She did not increase
Fall of Night
’s
speed or take evasive action. Equally, she did not deviate from their original course.
The Regals split their formation and surrounded Nissa’s ship. They had no difficulty matching pace. Kanu heard clangs and thumps as they knocked carelessly against the hull, followed by the long fingernail scrape of a spear or harpoon being drawn down the length of the ship.
‘It’s intimidation,’ Nissa said. ‘That’s all.’
A Regal suddenly stationed itself in front of the command-deck window, grappling on with plate-sized suction clamps. Kanu had a much better view of its armour and equipment now. It was a very muscular creature, with a powerful tail and torso, strong-looking arms, wide, webbed hands and barely any neck. It was hard to see its face behind the partial mask covering its nose and mouth, which he guessed was either a breathing apparatus or part of some water-intake and oxygenation system. Its eyes were hidden by strap-on goggles, pushed into the dough of its face like two black eggs. Its visible skin, where the armour did not cover it, was an off-white or pale green.
The Regal unclipped something from its utility belt that looked like a smaller version of the suction clamps, which it pushed against the glass before fiddling two tubes into holes on either side of its skull. Then it took another item from the belt, a metal cone, and jammed the open end of it hard against the glass. Kanu flinched as the Regal bent its face to the narrow end of the cone.
Indistinct, watery sounds came through the glass. It was language, possibly even one of the common tongues, but mangled beyond recognition by cultural isolation and the forbidding physics of this environment. Kanu thought he could make out a word or two, in what might have been Swahili –
identify
,
ocean
,
exclusion
,
anger
– but it was very difficult to be sure. He began to open his mouth, but Nissa raised a cautioning hand.
‘They can hear us now, through that stethoscope,’ she said in a low voice. Then, projecting her voice with theatrical clarity: ‘I am Nissa Mbaye. I have come to Europa on peaceful business under a Consolidation permit. The Margrave of Underthrace is expecting me. May I have safe passage?’
An answer came back. To Kanu’s ears, it was no more comprehensible than the first. But Nissa must have prepared herself for dialogue with the Regals.
Speaking for Kanu’s ears only, she said, ‘They say the Margrave won’t speak to me, so I’m wasting my time.’
‘That’s a good start.’
‘They also say they’re happy for me to waste my time provided I pay a tribute or a toll for passing through this part of the ocean.’
‘Were you expecting to pay a toll?’
‘I anticipated the demand.’ Nissa shifted her voice into her louder register. ‘I am honoured to offer tribute. I am opening my dorsal cargo hatch. Please take what you will, with my respect and gratitude.’
She made the hatch spring open. Kanu watched her silently, impressed by her preparedness. The Regal detached its stethoscope and unsuckered itself, then swam around the ship to join its fellows by the cargo hatch. The knocking and scraping had intensified around that area.
‘What did you bring?’ Kanu asked.
‘Medicines. Vitamins and food supplements.’ But in her voice he heard trepidation. It was all very well speculating on what the Regals would consider an acceptable tribute; it was quite a different matter to put that idea to the test.
Angry thumps and knocks sounded along the hull.
‘Could they damage us?’
‘Jam the thrusters and steering gear, maybe. Block the water-cooling intake. Not much else.’
‘That already sounds bad enough.’
Nissa’s expression tightened. The main Regal had returned to the window holding a fistful of small white pills, which were already beginning to dissolve into the water. The Regal mashed the soggy pills and hammered the pulped remains against the glass. It barked some oath into the water, the sound strong enough to reach Kanu even without the speaking cone. Then it gave a jerk of its tail and flicked away into the water.
The hammering and scraping abated. One or two strikes more, a dismissive final clang, and then they were free of the Regals.
‘Did we pass or fail?’
‘If we’d failed, we’d know it,’ Nissa said. ‘That was just their way of letting me know they were being generous, that my offering was at the lower threshold of what they consider acceptable.’
She touched a control and the window glass cleaned itself. The Regals had departed. They were alone again, still moving ever deeper into the ocean. Kanu did not allow himself to relax – there was too much on his mind for that – but they had cleared one hurdle and Nissa’s ingenuity led him to hope they would be capable of clearing more if they arose. If all else failed, he supposed, they always had the option of drilling their way back out of Europa. The Regals would not be so foolish as to try to hold them hostage . . . would they?
But they could only have travelled another few kilometres closer to Underthrace when their lights picked out a familiar masked and goggled face rising in the waters before them, as if to block their passage.
‘No,’ Nissa said, with anger this time. ‘We did a deal. We had an arrangement!’
But her concerns were misplaced. It was the same Regal, certainly, but there was no actual body accompanying its face. The Regal’s head had been cut off and skewered on a pike.
Holding the pike, hovering before them, was another humanoid aquatic creature. It carried no lights and its mostly black armour was both more functional and less ostentatious than that of the earlier Regals. It looked, to Kanu’s eyes, no less dangerous or forbidding.
But the creature waved its arm, indicating that they should follow it. With one flick of its tail it was under way, the Regal’s skewered head still in its grasp.
‘Finally,’ Nissa said. ‘Someone with manners.’
Goma rose early, by routine, with Ru still deeply asleep on her side of the bed. She had slept only fitfully, knowing that her mind would not be fully at ease until she had picked up the thread of last night’s aborted conversation. Not wishing to disturb Ru, she washed and dressed quietly before leaving the room. She went to one of the galleys and poured herself coffee. The galley was empty and she had passed hardly anyone else on her way there.
Travertine
’s lights were still dimmed to their nocturnal level, encouraging its human crew to continue following a diurnal sleep pattern. The ship was all shades of brown and amber now, and as quiet as a spacecraft could ever be. Non-essential life-support systems had been turned low or switched off completely and the noise of the drive – conducted through the fabric of the ship – amounted only to a distant, waterfall-like roar, as lullingly soporific as a white-noise generator.
Mposi would be awake, though. He was a creature of extreme habit and always up and working before anyone else. Granted, he no longer had the duties of his political life on Crucible, the pressures and obligations of high office. But he would find enough to keep himself busy no matter where he was, and Goma knew he currently had the matter of the saboteur to occupy his thoughts. No, Mposi would be awake by now and probably anxious to resume their conversation.
When the coffee had restored some clarity to her thoughts, Goma moved through the ship until she reached Mposi’s cabin. She knocked quietly on the door, not wishing to disturb anyone in the adjoining cabins, presuming they were occupied.
She waited a decent interval, then knocked again.
Two possibilities presented themselves: Mposi was profoundly asleep or had already left his room. She risked a harder set of knocks but there was still no sign of life.
Fine: he was already up and about.
Goma searched the obvious alternatives – the galleys, lounges and public spaces – and still there was no sign of her uncle. She went to the gym and found it empty. She checked the medical bay, just in case, but there was no one inside the glass-doored area.
By the time she got back to her own cabin, Ru was drowsily awake.
‘About last night—’
‘I can’t find Mposi.’
Ru scrunched her still-sleepy eyes. ‘Where have you looked?’
‘Just about everywhere. No sign of him in his cabin, no sign of him anywhere else.’
‘That still leaves a lot of the ship – places you and I can’t get into.’
‘I know. But Mposi shouldn’t be able to get into them either, not without special authorisation.’
Some alertness was returning to Ru. She dug dust from the corners of her eyes, inspected it with a sleepy fascination. ‘For which he’d need to go to Gandhari. You want to talk to her? For all we know, she and Mposi might be sharing a cabin by now.’
‘I’d have heard,’ Goma said, not particularly in the mood for humour. ‘Let’s leave her out of it for the moment. I’m concerned for him, but I don’t want to cause an unnecessary panic.’
‘You look panicked already.’
It was true, but Goma closed her eyes and forced a kind of calm upon herself. ‘He can’t have gone anywhere. It’s a ship, and there are only so many places he could be. I probably missed him. We’ll search thoroughly ourselves before we go to the captain.’
‘That’ll take a while. We’d better divide up the sections, meet back at our room every hour.’
‘Make it every thirty minutes,’ Goma said.
‘Fine, thirty minutes. And we
will
find him – probably at some porthole, gazing back at Crucible and wondering why the hell he ever signed up for this.’
Try as she might, Goma could not be cheered by this. ‘I’m worried for him.’
‘So am I, but he’ll be fine.’
Ru washed and dressed while Goma made chai. They drank it quickly, nothing much to say to each other, too much still unspoken from the night before. But when they were nearly ready to leave, Ru reached out and touched Goma’s wrist.
‘He’ll be all right. And I still love you.’
‘Thank you,’ Goma said.
They separated and searched the ship. The lights were beginning to warm up for the day cycle now, but the transition was gradual and there were still relatively few people moving around. This made it easier to look for Mposi, but also made Goma feel more conspicuous. She was going into parts of the ship she would not normally visit at these hours with no ready explanation for her presence there. She did not want to have to tell anyone that she was searching for her lost uncle. But as she searched the corridors, stairwells and passageways, no one minded her, or even engaged her in anything more than passing conversation.
Goma searched all the permitted areas in the lower half of the forward sphere, and then as much of the spine as she had access to. Since
Travertine
was still accelerating, entering the spine felt like descending into the supporting tower of some huge sphere-capped building, with another sphere at its foundation. Beyond a certain point, though, the lower levels were open only to technicians. Mposi might have had a way of getting through those locked bulkheads but she certainly did not.
Some doors offered access – via airlocks, disposal vents or cargo bays – to open space. But Goma was certain that Mposi could not have opened any of those doors without Gandhari Vasin being informed immediately. There would have been alarms, emergency procedures, staff dashing to the affected area. No; Mposi could not have left the ship – or been pushed off it, for that matter.
The thought was there, then. The possibility of murder. Was that melodramatic of her, given so little evidence of misfortune?
But Mposi had been aware of a possible sabotage plot, and he had spoken to Maslin Karayan only recently.
So yes, murder: why dismiss the obvious?
But she found neither Mposi nor his body. When she and Ru checked in with each other, at half-hourly intervals as agreed, Ru was having no more success.
‘I’ve accessed every room I can get into,’ she said. ‘That excludes all the private quarters, unoccupied rooms and various areas closed to anyone who isn’t on the technical staff. To get into those, we’ll need to see Gandhari.’
‘Maybe now we have cause,’ Goma said.
‘Have you double-checked his room, just in case he was sound asleep after all?’
‘Twice. And I’d have woken the dead the second time.’ She regretted the choice of words immediately. ‘I don’t think he’s in there. But again, we’d need the captain to open that door.’
‘Then we go to Gandhari. I had my doubts to begin with, Goma, but you’re right – we should have found him by now.’
‘One more sweep,’ Goma said. ‘If we were unlucky, he could have been taking one set of stairs while we were using another. Did you check the Knowledge Room?’
‘No, it was locked. Who ever uses that place, anyway, other than you?’
‘A few,’ Goma said. ‘And I’ve never known it to be locked.’
Still, Ru was right: Goma very rarely met anyone else in the Knowledge Room. Even after other people had started spending more time there, she had managed to hang onto the idea of it as her personal kingdom, an enclave of privacy and solitude where not even Ru was likely to wander.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she said. ‘We go straight to the captain now.’
‘I agree.’
Gandhari Vasin was readying herself for the day when they disturbed her, although still in her nightclothes. If Goma had expected resentment at their early arrival, none was evident.
‘You were right to tell me,’ she said, after taking a few moments to dress for the rest of the ship. ‘You ought to have found him by now, and I doubt he had the means to get through any of the sealed doors. Rest assured, though – he’s still on the ship, and we will find him.’
Goma mentioned the Knowledge Room. They had checked it again on the way to Vasin and found it still secured.
‘I’ve given no orders for it to be locked and I can’t see why it would be. Was it somewhere Mposi went very often?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Goma said.
And it was true. As the data in the Knowledge Room had hardly altered since departure, few people saw any reason to go in there at all. It would be different when they neared Gliese 163, but for most of them that was decades of sleep away.
‘Mposi’s not a scientist anyway,’ Ru said.
‘I know. And thank goodness for that,’ Vasin said. ‘He’s the one person on this ship the scientists and Second Chancers can both talk to.’
‘There’s you,’ Goma felt obliged to point out.
‘Next to Mposi, I’m a rank amateur. Your uncle’s liked and trusted by all parties, and that makes him as invaluable to me as any part of this ship. I shudder to think how we would ever have managed without him.’
Vasin opened a drawer and snapped a bangle around her wrist. ‘We had some lengthy discussions about the functionality of these devices. They allow access to the rooms, but they’re clearly capable of much more than that. Have you ever wondered why we didn’t make provision for communication, for localisation?’
‘I am now,’ Goma said.
‘The truth is, the bangles can do all of that and more if they need to, but our psychologists were against the idea. The dynamics of a ship aren’t the same as those of a city or even a planet. They considered it unwise to implement the full functionality. Sometimes it’s good to have the choice not to be found, not to be spoken to – especially on a starship. There’s enough to drive us mad without engineering the last traces of privacy out of our lives.’ But she offered a semi-smile. ‘Still, rank has its privileges. My bangle can locate any one of you if the need arises.’
‘You didn’t need to tell us that,’ Ru said, Goma sending a nod of agreement – both of them aware that Vasin had shown her trust in them with this confidence. ‘You’d have figured it out sooner or later.’ Vasin touched a stud on the bangle’s rim and raised her wrist to her lips. ‘Find Mposi Akinya, please. Throw his location onto my wall and open a vocal channel to his bangle.’
A diagram of the ship appeared on a blank portion of Vasin’s wall, outlined in glowing red lines. Lilac cross hairs appeared over part of the forward sphere, and then the whole thing zoomed in on that section.
‘That’s his room,’ Goma said, ‘but he isn’t answering his door.’
‘Mposi? This is Gandhari. Are you there? Speak, please. We are concerned about you.’
There was no answer.
Vasin lowered her wrist. ‘We’ll visit his room first, then look at the other possibilities.’
There was no need for a search party – Vasin had all the tools and authority she needed. They went quickly to Mposi’s quarters, where a touch of another stud on her bangle unlocked his door. Goma braced herself for the worst as they entered his rooms, but it was clear after a moment or two that he was not present. The bed was only slightly rumpled, a cup of honeyed chai standing cold on a table.
Vasin found his bangle tucked under a cushion.
‘He may have left it here by mistake,’ she said. ‘None of us was used to these things on Crucible.’
That was true, but after so long on the ship, Goma now felt naked without her bangle. She could not imagine Mposi feeling differently. Still – absent-minded old Mposi. She supposed it was possible.
‘I’d like to look in the Knowledge Room,’ Goma said.
‘Of course.’
They were there in minutes. Vasin opened the door, bidding Goma and Ru wait at the threshold while she went inside. Not only had the door been locked, but the room was totally dark. A second or two passed before the lights came on.
Goma caught Vasin’s intake of breath, a single sharp sound in the silence.
‘Gandhari?’
She came out again, visibly shocked, and in the gentlest of ways prevented Goma from entering or looking into the Knowledge Room. She closed the door and elevated the bangle to her lips. ‘Gandhari,’ she breathed, as if the shock had taken all the air from her lungs. ‘We have a technical emergency. Doctor Nhamedjo . . . Nasim, Aiyana . . . anyone who’s listening – come to the Knowledge Room immediately.’
‘What’s going on?’ Goma said.
‘I am sorry, Goma. I saw Mposi in there. In the display . . . in the Knowledge itself. He’s dead, Goma.’
‘Open the door.’
‘You do not need to see this. I want my technicians here, people who understand—’
‘Gandhari. Open the door. I want to see him.’
It was Goma speaking but the words almost felt like someone else’s, stuffed into her mouth. No, she did not want to see him at all. The last thing she wanted was evidence of her uncle’s death, plain and undeniable. She wanted to run away, to bash her head against a wall until she woke up from this awful dream. But the brave thing, the noble thing, was to pretend otherwise. To let everyone think she was courageous enough even for this.
Ru took her hands. ‘Let us in, Gandhari. It’s better that we see.’
Gandhari gave a regretful nod and opened the door. ‘You should not touch anything,’ she said, ‘no matter how much you want to. Something bad has happened to him. It may not be safe.’ And then, as if the words demanded a second utterance: ‘Something bad has happened.’
Mposi was in the Knowledge. Goma knew instantly it was him even though he had his back to the door. He was leaning against the side of the display tank, head lolling, left arm hanging over the side so that his fingers brushed the floor on which Goma now stood. There was a gash on his forehead, traces of dried blood around the wound, but no sign of any more grievous injury. He looked supremely relaxed – like a man who had dozed off in a jacuzzi.
‘Mposi,’ Goma said.
Her instinct was to rush to him, but she knew better than that. Something was very wrong with the well. As she circled around to his side, she saw that no part of Mposi was visible beneath the well’s surface. Instead of being transparent, the matrix of nanomachines had turned opaque and muddy. The colour quivered before her eyes, and the surface – normally flawless – rippled and surged. Mposi, what she could see of him, was unclothed. She moved around the tank for a better view of his lolling head. His eyes were closed, his expression slack, as if he had indeed drifted into sleep. But he was much too still for that, and their presence would surely have roused him by now.